Katy Perry Joins the Marines!

Well, temporarily, at least.

See: "Katy Perry Joins the Marines in 'Part of Me' Video."

Via Blazing Cat Fur, "Katy Perry made a smart move dumping Russell Brand..."

Justice for Trayvon Martin! Racial Tensions (and Hypocrisies) Flare in Wake of Florida Teen Shooting

Actually, I'm not criticizing the outrage over this shooting. What I am criticizing is the left's politicization of it. See Gateway Pundit, "It Begins… Far Left Media Ties Trayvon Martin Killing to Rush Limbaugh (Video)." Follow the link there to MSNBC analyst and Democratic strategist Karen Finney, who makes an aggressive attempt link the GOP presidential candidates to the death of Trayvon Martin. It's sick and disgusting and really has no place in the discussion. (And don't even get me started on this: "Farrakhan Tweets: 'Where There Is No Justice, There Will Be No Peace…Law of Retaliation May…Be Applied'.")

And while it's elevated, the discussion from last night's PBS NewsHour isn't that much better. I'm interested especially in the commentary from The Altantic's racial-grivance columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is interviewed. Listening to the guy he's clearly less impressive an intellectual when one actually hears his patter on television. He sounds not much more than a homie with a suit. Worse though is this Donna Britt lady, who says "Thank God" Treyvon Martin "looks like a kid ... he looks like someone who is young and vulnerable and who matters. And that's part of the reason why people have responded so much..." That's really cold and offensive --- it wouldn't matter if the victim was a genuine black thug? --- and it's a way for black intellectuals to completely discount --- even hide --- the real pathologies in the black community. For example, I'm no fan of Geraldo Rivero, but I think he's right to point out that the way the boy was dressed could have been a factor in his killing. So notice the discrepancy here: A black intellectual confesses that we should thank God that the boy wasn't an invulnerable hardened criminal, and that's "part of the reason people have responded so much," but when Geraldo Rivera speaks out on gangsta attire that's "victim blaming." Honestly, only on the left do you see these kinds of disgusting double standards.

The whole video is good but scroll forward to Britt's comments at about the 10:00 minute mark:

More later...

President Obama's Comments on Shooting Death of 17-Year-Old Trayvon Martin

Obama suggested that we all need to do some "soul searching," although he sidestepped the issue of whether the kid should have been wearing a hoodie.

See New York Times, "Obama Speaks Out on Trayvon Martin Killing." (Via Memeorandum.)

More: An excellent commentary from Ed Morrissey, "Obama weighs in on Trayvon Martin case."

Kim Kardashian Flour Attack

Well, I'm not sure what purpose this serves, but again, if someone can get in there with a sack of flour they can get in there with something deadly.

And see London's Daily Mail, "Pictured: The moment Kim Kardashian got flour-bombed... before TV star jokes: 'I told my make-up artist I needed more powder'," and Vanity Fair, "An Unabridged Analysis of the Kim Kardashian Flour Attack, and What It Means for Her Career."

And some additional coverage at LAT, "Fashion News: Kim Kardashian 'flour-bombed' at fragrance launch."

PREVIOUSLY: "Kim Kardashian Steps Out in Revealing Low-Cut Ensemble After Church," and "Kim Kardashian and Sisters Khloe and Kourtney Promote Their Kardashian Kollection."

ObamaCare Slow to Gain Favor in Public Opinion

Gallup reported on ObamaCare's weak public support a couple of weeks ago: "Americans Divided on Repeal of 2010 Healthcare Law."

Less than half of all Americans support the law, and a large majority of Republicans favor repeal.

The numbers are interesting if we recall that Democrats argued that support for the law would increase as Americans began to experience the benefits. Well, that's not happening. See the Wall Street Journal, "Health Law Slow to Win Favor: Some Provisions Stumble in Practice" (click through at Google):

When the health-care overhaul became law after a bitter debate, many Democrats predicted Americans would grow to like it as they started enjoying some of the early benefits.

The day after the president signed the bill into law, which happened exactly two years ago, an average of major polls collated by the website Real Clear Politics showed 50.4% of Americans opposed. This week, that had changed only by a tenth of a percentage point, ticking up to 50.5%.

The health law remains a tough sell for reasons that go beyond the drumbeat from Republicans for its repeal and questions about its constitutionality that will be debated next week at the Supreme Court. Several of the law's early pieces, designed to win public support, haven't worked as well in the real world as on paper and have irked even some of the Americans they were designed to help.

Some elements have been a success. An estimated 2.5 million young adults have gained coverage from the provision saying children can stay on their parents' plan until they turn 26, and Medicare beneficiaries have saved on prescription drug costs.

But, among some other less-successful provisions, an insurance plan designed to help the sick and uninsured before the full impact of the law kicks in has drawn only a fraction of the expected participants, because of high premiums and strict enrollment rules. Some states have already burned through federal cash allotted to them as costs have come in higher than anticipated.

Francee Levin, a 59-year-old artist in Columbia, S.C., said in March 2010 that she thought the law would be a "godsend." Injuries from being hit by a drunken driver had left her unable to find coverage. But when Ms. Levin looked into South Carolina's version of the plan, she decided she couldn't afford the premiums of $650 a month.

She rolled the dice and remained uninsured. Last month, just after Ms. Levin had given a class at a middle school, her heart suddenly stopped and had to be restarted with a defibrillator. Early bills from her two-week stay in the hospital, including helicopter transportation and six days on life support, top $10,000.

Another piece of the law that seemed like a winner—eliminating co-payments for preventive health services—spawned a religious battle over contraception coverage that has turned some Catholic leaders against the Obama administration. That happened after an advisory body deemed contraception preventive care.

The law's curbs on how severely insurers can limit annual claims payouts sparked a backlash, with the administration giving 1,231 employers and insurers waivers after some companies threatened to drop coverage altogether.

In addition, federal officials halted the creation of a long-term-care insurance program several months ago after deeming it financially unsustainable.

President Barack Obama doesn't plan to tout the law publicly on Friday, the second anniversary of his signing the bill. A senior administration official said his involvement politicizes the matter, which makes it all but impossible to change negative public opinion about the law.

Be sure to read it all.

Charles Krauthammer: The ObamaCare Reckoning

Now this is someone whose analysis is genuinely worthy.

See Krauthammer at Washington Post, "Obamacare: The reckoning" (via Memeorandum).

James Taranto Bitch Slaps Linda Greenhouse

I read only the first paragraph of Linda Greenhouse's ObamaCare essay last night:

Journalistic convention requires that when there are two identifiable sides to a story, each side gets its say, in neutral fashion, without the writer’s thumb on the scale. This rule presents a challenge when one side of a controversy obviously lacks merit. But mainstream journalism has learned to navigate those challenges, choosing evolution over “intelligent design,” for example, and treating climate change naysayers as cranks.

That passage combines so much condescension and anti-intellectualism it's almost funny, but the primary effect of Greenhouse's idiocy was to have me click the back button to find something else to read. So imagine the laugh I got this morning seeing James Taranto go after Greenhouse with a well-deserved bitch slap. See: "The Ineffective Greenhouse" (via Memeorandum).

Just read it at the link. Taranto is reasonable, and frankly tentative, in his commentary, a sign of someone willing to consider possible outcomes that differ from his ideological preferences.

Mohammad Merah Shot Dead Following 32-Hour Siege

Here's an earlier headline at London's Daily Mail, "WHY DIDN'T FRENCH POLICE STOP AL QAEDA FANATIC SOONER?" (via Memeorandum).

That's what I was asking last night.

And here's the latest update: "Al Qaeda claims Toulouse fanatic shot dead by police was 'one of ours' as it emerges killer had sick video of himself executing victims."

Plus, at Telegraph UK, "I am on an al-Qaeda mission, taunts besieged gunman who shot children."

More at New York Times, "French Slaying Suspect Dead After Police Raid Hideout" (via Memeorandum).

Thursday Night Kelly Brook Rule 5

Well, here's to kicking off a great weekend of blogging.

There's no shortage of political news, so more of that in a bit.

But perhaps some Rule 5 readers will enjoy this piece at London's Daily Mail, "'My secret's out!' Kelly Brook reveals the key to her bountiful cleavage... a pair of Sport Relief socks."

BONUS: At Pirate's Cove, "If All You See…are wonderful trees capturing CO2, you might just be a Warmist."

2012 L.A. Woman — Skateboarding Tour of Los Angeles

Via The Sound L.A.:

The Story of Obama and Israel

Via Caroline Glick:

And at New York Times, "Hawks Steering Debate on How to Take On Iran."

'The Road We've Traveled'

From Karl Rove, at Wall Street Journal, "Three dismal years are spun into 17 minutes of fact-challenged campaign film":

This month, Barack Obama's re-election campaign released a 17-minute film, "The Road We've Traveled," that previews the Democratic general election narrative. Directed by Academy Award winner Davis Guggenheim and narrated by actor Tom Hanks, the film explores Mr. Obama's most important decisions.

Viewers are told Mr. Obama deserves re-election for restoring America to prosperity after a recession "as deep as anything . . . since the Great Depression." He accomplished this in part, so the film says, by bailing out the auto companies—deciding not to just "give the car companies" or "the UAW the money" but to force them to "work together" and "modernize the automobile industry." The president, we're told, also confronted "one of the most worrisome problems facing America . . . the cost of health care."

Abroad, Mr. Obama ended the Iraq war and, in the "ultimate test of leadership," Osama bin Laden was killed on his watch. The film heralds Mr. Obama as a leader committed to "tough decisions" and as someone who "would not dwell in blame" in the Oval Office.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the last statement: Mr. Obama has spent three years wallowing in blame. His culprits have ranged from his predecessor, to tsunamis and earthquakes, to ATMs, to Fox News, to yours truly. If you Google "Obama, Blame, Bush" and "Obama, Inherited," you'll get tens of millions of hits.

As for inheriting the worst economy since the Great Depression: Perhaps Mr. Obama has forgotten the Carter presidency, which featured double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, and high unemployment.

The film is riddled with other inaccuracies and misleading claims. For example, the United Auto Workers may not have gotten "money" in the bailout, but as an unsecured creditor, the union received a 17.5% ownership interest in General Motors and 55% of Chrysler, while the companies' bondholders got hosed.

The film asserts that the auto companies "repaid their loans." But they still owe taxpayers $26.5 billion, and the Treasury Department's latest report to Congress noted that nearly $24 billion of the bailout money is gone forever.

The film includes Mr. Obama's 2008 claim that the death of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, from cancer "could have been prevented" if only she "had good, consistent insurance." But earlier this year, a biography of Dunham by Janny Scott, "A Singular Woman," revealed that she had health insurance that covered most all her medical bills, leaving only a few hundred dollars a month in deductibles and uncovered costs. For misleading viewers, the Washington Post fact checker awarded this segment of the film "Three Pinocchios" ...

 More at the link.

Walker Recall Vote Key Test of Union Power

At IBD, "Wisconsin Scott Walker Recall Election a Key Test for Future of Public Employee Union Power."

And at Wisconsin Reporter, "Report: Public-sector unions using dues to fight political assaults."

But see National Review, "The Wisconsin Governor is Confident He'll Win."

Obama's Corrosive Energy Strategy

Via Lonely Conservative:

Toulouse Victims' Funeral in Jerusalem

Via Israel Matzav:

Are You Comfortable, Monsieur Merah? Can We Get You Coffee, a Croissant?

I'm not one to joke at a time like this, but chalk it up to gallows humor.

The French have this guy "under siege," still? And this is the guy who murdered the Jews of the Ozar Hatorah School, in cold blood? Why? What's taking so long? Oh, wouldn't want to be too harsh on the jihadi, that might be racist, to hear Steve Erlanger of the New York Times:

Here's this just now from the Toronto Star, "Toulouse killings: Siege on suspect’s apartment drags on more than 24 hours":

After a siege that lasted more than 24 hours, the man suspected of a killing spree that shocked and terrified France remained holed up in his Toulouse apartment.

Authorities said Mohamed Merah told negotiators that he killed a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school on Monday and three French paratroopers last week to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The slayings stunned France in their brutal and calculated execution. Eyewitness reports led French Interior Minister Claude Guéant to describe the gunman as “someone very cold, very determined, very much a master of his movements and, by consequence, very cruel.”

Merah, 24, was caught hours after the victims were buried amid scenes of profound grief. At the Jerusalem cemetery known as Har Hamenuchot, or the Mount of Rest, family members wept as they buried a rabbi, his two sons and an 8-year-old girl who were killed outside Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse on Monday.

And Telegraph UK continues its live coverage.

And at Jerusalem Post, "Toulouse shooter standoff continues into second day":

Police have been trying to get 24-year-old Mohamed Merah to turn himself over after he fired through the door at them while they tried to storm his apartment in the suburbs of Toulouse in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Plus from D.G. Myers, at Commentary, "Removing All Traces of Islamist Terror from Toulous Shootings."

And from Melanie Phillips, at London's Daily Mail, "Laying the goundwork for the Toulouse massacre":

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Many Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh - and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’. As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was ‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which  it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

I'll have more later...

VIDEO: Police Raid Mohammed Merah Compound in Toulouse, France

This is a long siege.

See Telegraph UK, "Toulouse Siege: Live."

More at No Pasaran!, "First Images of the Toulouse Killer."

'Etch A Sketch'

What an amazing day in politics.

See Robert Stacy McCain, "Romney’s ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ Platform: Santorum’s ‘Act of God’ Moment?" (via Memeorandum).

And at the New York Times, "Shaking It Up With a Popular Low-Tech Toy: Etch A Sketch Becomes a Symbol of Second Chances":

THE United States is the great land of second chances. Change your name. Change your location. Change your life. If you’re a politician, change your ideas, and in so doing, change your prospects. It’s a deep-rooted American tradition that the Mitt Romney campaign has now given a colorful symbol.

It was widely reported that Wednesday on CNN, Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, predicted a fresh start for his boss’s campaign after victory in the Illinois primary. “Everything changes,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

Mr. Romney’s political opponents seized on the image as a sinister expression of the candidate’s pliability. But to millions of Americans, the Etch A Sketch has offered a precious life lesson: No matter how badly you screw up, you can always make a fresh start. The past does not exist. The Etch A Sketch offers total deniability in a neat rectangular package.

The Etch A Sketch was invented in the late 1950s by André Cassagnes, a French electrician, and the first model was manufactured for the American market by the Ohio Art Company on July 12, 1960. The device is simple and ingenious: a framed plastic screen coated with aluminum dust on the reverse side. Two knobs move a stylus vertically and horizontally, allowing the user to draw pictures as the tip of the stylus leaves a dark line against a light gray background.

If the results do not please, the user simply shakes the screen, causing polystyrene beads to create a fresh surface by smoothing out and recoating the inside of the screen. History, with a flick of the wrist, vanishes.

Over the years, the company has added color and electronic features, but the essential appeal of the device has remained the same. No matter how bad the drawing, how distant the final product from the original intent, the clock can be turned back.

More at Pundette, "The Etch A Sketch candidate."

And the response at Astute Bloggers, "ROMNEY ETCH-A-SKETCH BROUHAHA IS BULLSHIT."

And It's Too Late Baby, Now It's Too Late...

Some wonderful music until later.

I picked up this up at The Sound L.A. when I dropped off my kid at school. Here's set:

8:47  Feels Like The First Time  by Foreigner

8:43  Rocky Raccoon  by Beatles

8:39  Behind Blue Eyes  by Who

8:37  The Letter  by Box Tops

8:20  Free Bird  by Lynyrd Skynyrd

8:16  Gimme Three Steps  by Lynyrd Skynyrd

8:11  It's Too Late  by Carole King

8:08  I Feel The Earth Move  by Carole King

8:02  For You  by Bruce Springsteen

7:58  Evil Woman  by E.L.O.

French Forces in Standoff With Shooting Suspect Mohammed Merah

There are all kinds of conflicting reports, and it's not clear yet if the suspect is in custody.

Check the live updates at Telegraph UK.

Plus, at Washington Post, "Mohammed Merah, French shooting suspect, exchanges gunfire with police in standoff."

And at Jerusalem Post, "Juppe: Police not at fault for not arresting suspect sooner."